


The Last Hearth

by tsunderestorm



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Gen, Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV (2016), Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-07
Updated: 2019-11-07
Packaged: 2021-01-24 13:28:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,146
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21338989
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tsunderestorm/pseuds/tsunderestorm
Summary: Galahd called out to Libertus like a siren’s song.
Comments: 10
Kudos: 9





	The Last Hearth

**Author's Note:**

> This piece was published in the Kingsglaive-themed zine [For Hearth & Home](twitter.com/kingsglaivezine). I was invited to contribute as a guest author, and I was honored to participate! The "T" rating is just to be safe; while not graphic, there are a few brief descriptions of violence.

Lestallum had been a haven for ten years, but it wasn’t _home_. It was a base of operations at best; a place full of people that needed protected that he just hadn’t been able to ignore, even when he longed for the smell of the river and the sounds of nature coming back to life. But was a hero’s work ever truly done? When the Long Night ended and people spilled out of their homes hungry for the sun that they’d been deprived of for ten years, when the last power line dotting the countryside was restored and electricity coursed once more through rebuilt Insomnia to the farthest rest stop in Cleigne, when the last of the Glaives who had answered Lestallum’s call had retired…only then did he let himself think again of the verdant landscape and sparkling water of his homeland. Only then did he let himself be pulled, puppet-like, to the home he’d been forced to abandon. 

Galahd called out to Libertus like a siren’s song. Galahd held everything: memories that comforted like a lullaby even if they cut like a blade, a feeling of belonging not even half a lifetime in bright Insomnia could provide, a sense of pride. An opportunity for rebirth… _hope_. He’d told his best friend that he’d await him there, and even if the King’s guards had told him that Nyx Ulric had died a lion-hearted champion, he’d still wait where the water lapped at the banks to give Nyx a hero’s welcome when he finally decided to saunter into town.

When his feet touched the damp earth of his homeland, he was greeted with carnage. The wreckage of Niflheim airships littered the hills, pieces of scorched magitek metal on the banks of the river in which he had practically lived as a boy and marks black as scorched pitch marred the bare ground. Bones of the daemon’s victims littered the landscape in a way that made him sick: a shallow mass grave of people who shared his blood. The Ulrics’ house was a cluster of overgrown bricks and the Ostiums’ had fared no better… after all, on the night the Niffs attacked, what few people capable of rising to the duty of warrior hadn’t been interested in protecting houses, and even before a decade of darkness the years had not been kind.

The bar, though… the bar had survived even when some of the residences hadn’t, presumably a less important target in the Niflheim attack than the homes filled with innocent people. The neon sign was burnt out and busted, hanging crooked from the storefront like a broken limb, eerie and off-kilter. Window panes were shattered and the door hung off its hinges, but it was still standing, true to its name like never before. _The Last Hearth_.

Hearth. Home. Those words, that saying… the one that all the Glaives had said so many times they had become a prayer, a battle cry, a mantra, a dogma. Words of heroes.

Clean-up was arduous. It wasn’t just the debris; it was the desolation. It was the memories that coursed through every inch of the battle-scarred landscape, through the greenery that was just starting to recover after the miasma of scourge had blanketed everything. When it was all said and done, the bar was the center of the town. New Galahd: a phoenix rising from the ashes of war. Crowe would love it, he knew; would love the way the fire and electricity crackled beneath their feet even as humanity built back up around it. Galahd had always been wild in that way, and the bar had always been a refuge against the animals prowling the night.

The Last Hearth wasn’t ever going to be the most prosperous bar, but that wasn’t the point. It never had been, not when Libertus’ father had run it and not when he and Nyx had taken it over in their nineteenth summer. It was a haven even still, always lit up with restored electricity like midday even in the dead of the night, a defense against the dark. The daemons hadn’t existed for years, but every person in that bar, regular or travelers just passing through knew all too well the claws, teeth, stink and rot of the daemons that ravaged the land.

He wished they could see it. Nyx, Crowe, Pelna, the few other glaives that hadn’t sold them out to the goddamn Niffs of all people. Their pictures plastered the wall, an informal monument held together by pieces of tape, thumbtacks, and rusted nails. Nyx’s picture smiled at him from a heavy wooden frame near the top of the wall, an arm slung around Libertus’ shoulders and that easygoing, “I could make you fall in love with me with one look and I don’t even know it” smile on his face. They were twenty-one in that picture, totally unaware of the roles they’d play. Crowe’s picture was taken much later, when she’d graduated from the dirty rags of an orphan to the sleek black leather of her Kingsglaive uniform, embellished to her tastes. It was a candid, taken in the split second where she laughed with reckless abandon before she’d realized Libertus had been holding a camera. In another picture they wore their civilian clothes: faded tanks and jeans to rest easy around a table outside Yama’s; in another they posed after a mission with black leathers battle-damaged and singed, proof of their mettle that deserved victorious fists in the air. It was the best type of shrine he could think of: an homage to the heroes they’d been.

Some nights he swore he could see Nyx at the end of the bar, fingers rubbing condensation off a long-neck bottle, and he could damn sure feel him when the night gave way to dawn. There were times that Crowe’s ghost looked at him with those knowing, haunted eyes from over by the pinball machine, his memory of her forever waiting to slide another coin into the machine so she could play as Malbuddy. He felt her when the fire roared in the grate on snowy days, fierce and temperamental. He felt her when rain lashed the windows during a storm, destructive and unrelenting.

Did he feel guilty? Of course, he did. It ate him alive more nights than it didn’t, chewing at his gut and telling him _it should have been you_. It should have been him lying on that autopsy table, it should have been him who stayed behind in the city to take a beating from that bastard Drautos and then maybe Nyx would be serving up drinks in their bar and he’d be the one missing or dead. 

“I’m still waiting, Hero.” Libertus said to the emptiness of the night, raising his drink to the wall of the fallen. “You come on back to Galahd anytime, now.”

**Author's Note:**

> I am [tsunderestorm](twitter.com/tsunderestorm) on twitter!


End file.
